Fame

IT MIGHT COME as a surprise to some Philadelphia-area boxing fans, but Pittsburgh is located in Pennsylvania. So are other towns in the commonwealth that have produced notable fighters who were not born in, or primarily based in, Pennsylvania's most populous city. It's a long-overdue honor, but the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame finally gets around to enshrining one of the state's all-time greats on May 19, when Charley Burley - who was born in Bessemer, Pa., on Sept. 6, 1917, and was 75 when he died on Oct. 16, 1992, in his longtime hometown of Pittsburgh - heads the 10-member Class of 2013.

Van Cliburn, 78, the intrepid pianist whose 1958 win at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow was seized upon as a stroke of American triumphalism at the height of the Cold War, died Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth, Texas. He died of bone cancer, his publicist said. Striking Soviet gold transformed Mr. Cliburn from pianist into pop-culture phenomenon. Inevitably described as a "lanky Texan," whose 6 feet, 4 inches were topped by a wavy, flaxen pompadour, he was welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade down lower Broadway that was compared to the one in 1927 for Charles A. Lindbergh.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Mike Schmidt always comes to spring training armed with strong opinions, but the Hall of Fame third baseman did not want to get overly involved in talk about baseball's steroid era. Steroids took center stage last month when the Baseball Writers Association of America did not vote to induct any of the players on the Hall of Fame ballot. "I sort of ride the fence on that whole steroid era issue," Schmidt said. "I don't have a definite opinion like some of my fellow Hall of Famers.

LAS VEGAS - Bullets were flying from a black Range Rover at a gray Maserati as the vehicles raced toward a red light on the Las Vegas Strip. Beneath the neon lights, police say, the Maserati ran a red light at one of the Strip's busiest intersections and smashed into a taxi that exploded into flames early Thursday, killing the two people inside. Three more cars and a utility truck collided at the crossroads home to Bellagio, Caesars Palace, and Bally's, leaving at least six more people injured as the Range Rover sped off in the predawn darkness.

Roger Clemens said little publicly in the immediate aftermath of the Hall of Fame vote. More than a month later, he's willing to share his thoughts, about the vote - and more. About missing out on the Hall of Fame: "I'm not going to lose any sleep over it," Clemens said. "If those guys feel I deserve to be there, then I deserve to be there. If they feel I don't, then that's OK, too. " About country star Mindy McCready, who made headlines in April 2008 when she claimed a longtime relationship with Clemens: Clemens handed out a written statement that said, "Yes, that is sad news" about her apparent suicide.

ROGER CLEMENS said little publicly in the immediate aftermath of the Hall of Fame vote. More than a month later, he's willing to share his thoughts - but the 354-game winner is not about to start a lobbying campaign. "I'm not going to lose any sleep over it," Clemens said in Kissimmee, Fla. "If those guys feel I deserve to be there, then I deserve to be there. If they feel I don't, then that's OK, too. " Clemens was at spring training Monday as a special instructor for the Houston Astros, and he spoke for a bit with the team's pitchers about his mental approach to the game.

HOUSTON - Philadelphia native and five-time WNBA all-star Dawn Staley and former 76er Maurice Cheeks are among 12 finalists for election into the Basketball Hall of Fame. St. Joseph's Prep coach Speedy Morris was nominated but is not a finalist. Former Houston Cougars coach Guy Lewis has been chosen as a finalist for the first time since 2003. Current Louisville coach Rick Pitino and former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian also are finalists for the 2013 class. The others includes former NBA stars Gary Payton, Tim Hardaway, Mitch Richmond, Spencer Haywood, and Bernard King; longtime North Carolina women's coach Sylvia Hatchell; and Boston Celtics great Tom Heinsohn, already inducted as a player, is a finalist in the coaching category.

HOUSTON - Dikembe Mutombo thinks he deserves induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. The 7-2 Mutombo, the starting center on the Sixers team that played in the NBA Finals, will be eligible beginning in 2015 after his retirement following the 2008-09 season. He ranks second on the NBA's career blocked-shots list (3,256), behind only Hakeem Olajuwon (3,830) and he says surpassing every player but Olajuwon on that list should alone merit inclusion in the Hall. Mutombo was also a four-time defensive player of the year, an eight-time All-Star and twice the league's top rebounder (2000-01)

Larry Cardonick was an unlikely sort of special education teacher. When he walked into that first classroom in the late 1950s, he had just left the Canadian Football League, where, despite being under six feet tall and not particularly large, he played defense for the Sarnia Golden Bears on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario. That was until knee injuries caught up with him, and he returned to his native Philadelphia. Mr. Cardonick, 80, of Cherry Hill, died Friday, Feb. 8, at the Genesis Eldercare home in Voorhees after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

ONCE, WHEN the Internet was not as friendly and we sought to observe athletic greatness rather than quantify it, sports was a simpler world. You watched under well-lit skies and inside of electrified arenas and amid pivotal moments and you did not need to look anything up afterward to understand what you saw. There were numbers guys back then of course, keeping their own stats in notebooks, reciting them at the lunch table or later, at the end...